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¡Hola a todos! I hope these resources are of use. I know with recent current events it may seem like the future of education is bleak, however, we must remain strong and stay in solidarity. Together we can get through these dark times!

— Additionally, Reforma shared about Talk Story Together- Sharing Stories, Sharing Culture. This is a great joint literacy project from the American Indian Library Association and the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association that celebrates and explores the stories of children and their families. Story telling is embedded in culture, and it’s a meaningful way to learn about each other.

Hola a todos! This Week in Review is quite long, but I assure you it is full of resources and knowledge that needs to be shared.

– ColorLines shared a recent snippet from the show Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, inviting readers to “Watch John Oliver Break Down How School Resegregation Hurts Students.” “Black and Latino children are more likely to attend school with inexperienced teachers who are then less likely to offer a college prep curriculum… [and are] 6 times as likely to be in poverty schools.”

– The Horn Book published an article on “Decolonizing Nostalgia: When Historical Fiction Betrays Readers of Color” by Sarah Hannah Gómez, in which she writes: “Omitting nonwhites from episodic historical fiction and the everyday history that informs our lives today says that the only contribution by people of color to society is conflict. Deleting them from the continuous line of history is a lie that perpetuates this insidious myth. And middle-grade historical fiction has a long way to go to acknowledge this betrayal to readers and attempt to overcome it.”

— The blog, Reading While White, shared a guest post with one of our favorite authors, Yuyi Morales, who discusses “Day of the Dead, Ghosts, and the Work We Do as Writers and Artists.” Morales offers a beautiful discussion of her personal practices related to Día de los Muertos and the implications of its distortion in the general media and children’s books.

–The Zinn Education Project just shared The #NoDAPL syllabus for high school and adults. This resource contextualizes how the current resistance in North Dakota is tied to a “broader historical, political, economic, and social context going back over 500 years to the first expeditions of Columbus” and features the practices of “Indigenous peoples around the world [who] have been on the frontlines of conflicts like Standing Rock for centuries.” “

Don’t look now but we’ve already arrived in March! Three months into the new year and we are shifting from Black History to Herstory. As a starting point for the month, I thought it might be nice to open with a post that highlights many of the important Latin American women in history that could make their way into your classrooms this month! In this resource, Paola Capó-García collects brief histories of each of the several important women she introduces.

Aside from the ever popular Frida Kahlo and Sor Juana Inéz de la Cruz, whom we have discussed on the blog in years past, the featured resource also introduces less cited women in Latin American history, like Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo. Tying into our theme of activism in Latin America, Las Madres were the women in Argentina during the “Dirty Wars” who protested the disappearance of their children and grandchildren in front of the presidential palace. Continue reading →

Before I talk about our upcoming month, I have to acknowledge that we’re still smack dab in the middle of Hispanic Heritage Month (HHM), and here at Vamos a Leer remain caught in a love-hate relationship with it. Even while HHM promotes the discussion about Latin@/Hispanic culture, it minimizes the conversation to stereotypes and relegates the information to one month out of the year, effectively communicating to students that Latin@/Hispanic heritage offers a “break” from the real curriculum; it’s apart from authenticate knowledge. There are many, many reasons why this is problematic. Katrina has discussed some of them on the blog, joining other educators such as Enid Lee and Deborah Menkart who advocate for a “beyond heroes and holidays” approach to education. In short, she’s advocated for a classroom where discussions of other cultures are not limited to one month out of the year, but instead are integrated meaningfully throughout the curriculum.

But we’re not suggesting dismissing HHM completely. Instead, much like readers who responded to a recent poll on “How do you feel about Hispanic Heritage Month? Tell us” organized by LatinoUSA, we suggest that HHM is “what you make of it.” Let’s use this an opportunity to start (or better, continue!) meaningful conversations about Latin@/Hispanic heritage, but conversations unfettered by the arbitrary dates of Sept. 15 – Oct. 15. Continue reading →

I am incredibly excited to share this week’s resource from the Wide World of the Web, because this resource not only contains the translated work of three phenomenal female modernist poets from South America, but it also helps tell the background story of how these three women came to be bound together in the June 1925 Issue of Poetry Magazine. This historic issue, published in New York during a time when modernists such as Ezra Pound and T.S. Elliot were working out ways to form a new poetic tradition for the 20th century, this June 1925 issue featured an astonishing thirty-one South and Central American poets. Among them were poets Alfonsina Storni, Juana de Ibarbourou, and Gabriela Mistral (featured in Lorraine’s Mira Look post earlier this week). In this amazing resource you will find the poets featured in 1925 organized according to country. You can find Storni’s poem “Running Water” under Argentina, Mistral’s “Ecstasy” under Chile, and Ibarbourou’s “Bond” under Uruguay. All three of these pieces are excellent examples not only of 20th century modernist poetry, but of the perspective of Western educated Latin American women of that time.

In Ibarbourou’s “Bond”, the poet replaces common articles of feminine adornment to symbolize the suffering endured by societal pressures of beauty. Ibarbourou (spelled Ibarbouron in the 1925 edition), who was a lifelong advocate and writer on women’s rights in Uruguay and abroad, replaced diadems with a crown of thorns and earnings with “two burning coals vermilion.” Continue reading →

We’re interrupting your regularly scheduled En la Clase to bring you a review of the remarkable book Poli: A Mexican Boy in Early Texas. Written by Jay Neugeborn in 1989, Poli is celebrating a 25th anniversary edition printing from the Texas Tech University Press. It’s a biography of a lesser-known Mexican-American who was deeply involved in the formative years of the southwestern frontier of the United States. As Neugeborn explains in the preface,

“José Policarpo Rodríguez was born in Zaragoas, Mexico, on January 26, 1829, at a time when Texas was part of the Republic of Mexico, and the Rio Grande ran peacefully through the northern province of Coahuila. This book is based on Poli’s memories…”

This fictionalized biography focuses on Poli’s time growing into adulthood on what was then the Mexican-US border. Neugeborn admits that he took “imaginative liberties” by “inventing dialogue and characters here and there, shifting and/or combining some elements for dramatic or narrative ends.” But underneath those creative flourishes lies the factual structure of the events of Poli’s childhood – years in which he increasingly became aware of the economic impoverishment of Mexico; the genocidal policies and practices leveraged against the Comanche nation by the US; the brutal enslavement of African-Americans in the US; and the political, cultural, and historical disagreements (to put it mildly) between the many people who were trying to live in the contested frontier region. This is not to make it sound as though the book is wholly depressing! Interspersed throughout the serious reflections are small, lighter observations about Poli’s life, including his preference for the Mexican fruit chictzapotl or the chocolate drink atole.

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Our wonderful local partners in crime, the staff at Bookworks, are hosting a discussion this week with Canadian author Anthony De Sa on Thursday, April 10, 2014, at 7:00 p.m. De Sa will discuss his book Kicking the Sky, an adult novel but one with major young adult crossover because the main character is a young person. It takes place in the Portuguese neighborhoods of Toronto. The novel is hybrid, filling an odd space between fiction and non-fiction, adult and young-adult. Although based on gruesome events, the novel is carried out through a naive point of view of an adolescent protagonist.

This is certainly not for the faint of heart. It’s a book that may be appropriate for high school audiences, which, despite the subject matter, is not altogether surprising given that the author himself is a high school teacher in Toronto. Continue reading →

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Vamos a Leer is overseen by the Latin American & Iberian Institute (LAII) at the University of New Mexico. The LAII is designated a National Resource Center for Latin America by the U.S. Department of Education. The Vamos a Leer blog supports K-12 teaching about Latin America by providing resources to educators, including lesson plans, author + book suggestions, and related materials.

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